29th July
We have spent the past few nights at Mataranka, which is about an hour south of Katherine on the Stuart Highway. The area is famous for its Hot Springs – Mataranka and Bitter Springs. The water is a constant temperature of 34 degrees and is hot only due to the ground temperature of the limestone it travels through to reach the surface. The water at both spring areas is incredibly clear.
The springs at Mataranka flow into some man-made pools they have made in the river, at an amazing rate of 30 million litres a day. Bitter Springs are a bit more natural, but narrower. You can float downstream enjoying the scenery above the water or, like we did, put on your goggles and snorkels and check out the river below. It was cool to see what the river looks like bellow and we saw a couple of little turtles too.
We stayed at Mataranka Homestead. It was great because we were right next to the swimming hole and had fun terrain for the kids to ride their bikes. We have had wallabies at a lot of the places we have camped during the past few weeks, but we had this lovely wallaby here with her little joey. We even got lucky and saw it climb in and out of the pouch.
But, by far, the biggest attraction for the kids about staying here, was seeing Nathan Grigg’s whip cracking show. He holds 3 world records for whip-cracking, both for speed and length of the whip cracked. He does a 40 minute show most nights here. It was entertaining and pretty impressive. He made the whips imitate different sounds. Cam made his second stage appearance in as many nights when he made the toot-toot sound when he did the Steam Train imitation. He also made the whips look like lightning, using white whips and strobes. And finished his show with whips on fire. We also saw his show during the day at the Sunday markets.
The Travelling Dixons 